Real-World Testing

For real-world tests, we will test against a conventional 7200RPM Harddrive (500GB Seagate 7200.12) in real-world usage from OS boot, Game load times, application load times, and copy operations.

The measurements were made by hand, and as such, we should mention that the results should be interpreted with a knowledge of the relative accuracy precision of the measurements. The measurements are made with a hand stopwatch, so there is human response time as well as the response time of the stopwatch, and its individual accuracy. With that said, all of the measurements were taken three or four times to allow averages to help level out individual measurement errors, then the average was taken. Each measurement is likely accurate to within ±.2s, which is plenty accurate enough to illustrate the benefits of the Pyro SSD over conventional harddrives for real-world usage. Most real-world comparisons between different SSDs are so similar due to the relatively low load placed on the drive, it's usually not a worthwhile comparison to make. Long, high-load real world tests tend to highlight differences better, but are usually very lengthy and rather difficult to run and measure.

As we can clearly see here, the real-world gains between a traditional SSD and an HDD is nothing short of substantial. It quickly becomes a luxury that is easy to get used to, with near-instant Firefox load times, and super fast Windows 7 boot times, and everything in between. Games see a few seconds of level load benefit, and more data-intensive games/sims like X-Plane 9 or DCS A-10 see a huge gain, nearly halving the load times. Copy operations are speed up by a large margin, and everything from simple OS navigation to program installation sees a near-instant response. Programs install in a blink, and with quick-boot enabled, you are into your OS after the first button push in mere seconds, and system resume pops up in a snap.